Went to the Bay Area Maker Fair — attendance estimated at 125,000 for the weekend, clear 95°+F weather, ridiculous sardine-can crowd conditions, meh-to-magnificent-to-magical — total geek-out heaven — a rare venue that unites the universe of creative makery and Burner mockery — where a guy in kilt and goggles and a girl in strings of bottle caps and LED lights feel right at home... even celebrated.

​Rube Goldberg is alive and well next to the next Einsteins, Jobs and Musks. In short, I can't wait for 'til next year!

Maker Faire is a creative, cacophonic, enthusiastic explosion (often literally) to entertain, explore, astound, delight and wonder at. Involvement and immersion in the "maker experience" is an important part of what makes The Faire work.

​I highly recommend Maker Faires, wherever you are with over 120 featured and mini Maker Faires all over the USA and including Tokyo, Rome, Detroit, Oslo and Shenzhen!

Inventors can gain ideas, inspiration, knowledge, instruction, mentors and collaborators at Maker Faires, as well as the myriad of maker spaces that are popping up all over the place.

Katharine Burr Blodgett (1898-1979) invented coatings for glass that made it anti-reflective, coined "invisible glass." She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in Physics from the University of Cambridge in 1926.

Katharine held eight patents as a scientist who contributed to breakthroughs in cinematography, plasma physics, deicing aircraft wings, poison gas adsorbents and improvements to the light bulb.

Here are three women who have some things in common. What do you think they are?

Stephanie Kwolek, Kevlar's inventor.

​Stephanie Kwolek (1923-2014) created the unusually lightweight and durable new fiber that DuPont later developed into Kevlar, used in everything from military helmets to sports equipment to fiber-optic cables. She worked for DuPont for 40 years.

She was the only woman to be awarded DuPont's Lavoisier Medal for outstanding technical achievement. DuPont has made billions in revenue from Stephanie's work, yet she never benefitted directly. After she retired she worked specifically to introduce girls to scientific fields, and tutored in chemistry.

Mary Lou Jepsen, very much alive!

I don't know her well, but Mary Lou Jepsen (1965-) is one of my favorite people. An explorer, entrepreneur, pioneer and moonshot dreamer, I first found out about Mary Lou through my friend Edward Cherlin, who was working with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, developing educational resources for children. He told me about the laptop's screen, which could switch from full color to daylight-readable black-and-white. I said "What?"

Mary Lou was a co-founder of that project with Nicholas Negroponte and the lead inventor of the "$100 Laptop." The OLPC project is so valuable to teach how powerful constraints are for truly breakthrough product design.

Mary Lou Jepsen — one of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in the World — is a very long way from being done. Her work in optics, computers, screen technologies, VR, AR, wearables and now medical visualization wearables is astonishing. I can't wait to see what she does next, and is one of my favorite people to follow. Watch her TED Talk here.

Sourced from Wikipedia, bio and personal websites. These three women represent a small but powerful force whose inventions have literally changed the world, and continue to inspire women (and men) to lead in invention, science, technology and social entrepreneurship.

What does this have to do with inventing? I'll get to that in a minute...

This is a really well-done film... at least all Americans should see it, although it will have global appeal. I'm not going to review it here either.

I saw "Hidden Figures" this evening... a fascinating bit of history that most people had no idea about. I didn't until the trailers came out, and relatively recently. I had two big questions after seeing it:

Why now, and why did it take from 1961 to NOW — 55 years!! — to get this to the general public?

What big-hairy-audacious-goal would galvanize America to compete, as in the Space Race, again?

I've been listening to audio books about some of our greatest inventors: Tesla, Edison, the Wright Brothers, and others, which I'll be reporting on soon. It struck me that these inventors were engaged in competition to bring electricity, lighting and flight to the masses... the best sort of competition is where everyone wins! The inventors won, the companies who manufactured these products won, and the people won.

So, a Call to Action to all inventors is to work on something like renewable energy, a combination of high-efficiency solar, wind power, safe/sane nuclear power, wave/current power and other energy generation — everyone wins! Jobs are created, less pollution, etc. And regardless of global warming, this would be a boon to all. Instead of a "Space Race," how about an "Energy Race"?

What other Big Ideas could inventors work on collaboratively to make a difference to all humanity?

The iconic photo of the first powered, controlled flight of an aeroplane!

A reproduction of the 1903 Flyer engine the Wrights built themselves.

Recently finished listening to the audio book narrated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author... Audible is a great resource! Mr. McCullough goes into fascinating detail about their early lives, their supportive sister Katherine and learned father Bishop Wright. Seems David even writes using language that emulates American-speak during the early 1900s.

There is great detail about their academic research, exhaustive and careful experiments, countless prototypes and tests... even building their own small wind tunnel to test wing shapes, which they fashioned after years of watching birds in flight. The book also details their lives after that first flight through continued test flights and constant improvements. And they did it all for less than $2,000. Samuel Langley had about $70,000 of US taxpayer money at his disposal and never did produce a machine that actually flew. Look for a future post about spending money on inventing!​A reproduction of the 1903 Flyer engine the Wrights built themselves.​The brothers Wright did it all themselves too. When they got around to powering their glider, they had to design and make their own propellers. They couldn't find an engine that suited them, so they built their own.

They were singularly focused on flying too. From the book, Wilbur Wright was quoted about the newfangled automobiles that were around at the time: "He could not imagine... how any contrivance that made such a racket and had so many things constantly going wrong with it could ever have a future." However they could certainly imagine a future of powered flight, and persisted until they claimed the ultimate prize.

I built a wood and paper kite exactly like this many years ago and hung it in my office the same way for a long time — inspired by seeing a full-size version at the Smithsonian.